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March 31, 2006

MINING THE PAST

Looking through my files, I see more than a dozen videotapes hidden away in the dark recess of a book shelf. Off the top of my head, I didn't recall making as many. But there they are, most of them dating from 1971 and 1972. They document the works and views of a handful of writers and artists, among them William S. Burroughs and filmmaker Antony Balch in London; Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco; action-sound poet Bernard Heidsieck and critic/journalist Rafael Sorin in Paris; Fluxus artist Alison Knowles in Vermont; even one of my own video pieces.

To be looking back like this must be a sign of age or dementia, or both. Anyway, here's what I found:

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Four videos.

Burroughs/Balch Experiment
Recorded live at WSB's London flat (8 Duke St., St. James, London) on Dec. 21, 1971. Approx. 10 minutes.

Burroughs's face is transformed via Balch's film projection of other faces on his. The result is seen and heard with a live soundtrack in the video recording by Herman as an illustration of propaganda techniques. Antony Balch was an experimental filmmaker ("Towers Open Fire," etc.) who often collaborated with Burroughs.

WSB talked about this video with Robert Palmer in "Rolling Stone Interviews William Burroughs." It was published in Rolling Stone (108: 34-39) on May 11, 1972. This is what he said:

"Jan Herman was here with his little video camera outfit and we did quite a precise experiment, which was: Antony brought up the Bill and Tony film, I sat there, and he projected it onto my face, which was re-photographed on the video camera, but that faded in and out so that it would be that face, then fade back to the now face, so that you got a real time section. We wanted to project it onto the television screen from the camera, but we couldn't because the cycles were different; Antony and Jan Herman were fooling around and they managed to suck up the television. But even seeing it on a little view screen, it was something quite extraordinary."

I don't recall screwing up Uncle Bill's TV, but maybe we did. Palmer's interview is reprinted in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997.

Burroughs/Sommerville/Mottram /Herman Discussion
Recorded live at WSB's London flat (8 Duke St., St. James, London) on Dec. 18, 1971.
Three tapes: 1) approx. 15 minutes; 2) approx. 20 minutes; 3) approx. 20 minutes.

Combination of discussions and interviews among Burroughs, Ian Sommerville (WSB's longtime companion and, with Brion Gysin, creator of "the dream machine"); Eric Mottram (British literary scholar, critic, poet, and professor of English and American Literature at King's College London); and Herman. Live recording includes slices of TV and images of Sommerville's own apartment. The conversations range widely about Burroughs's theories and includes some discussion of "subliminal" propaganda.

ALLEN GINSBERG
Two videos.

"Holy Thursday" and "Infant Joy"
Recorded live at Pacific High Studio (60 Bradey St., San Francisco) on Aug. 21, 1971.
Two tapes: 1) approx. 20 minutes; 2) approx. 20 minutes.

Work sessions for Fantasy recording of Blake songs put to music by Allen Ginsberg with the help of fellow artists who recorded with him. I don't think Fantasy ever released these.

Voice: Allen Ginsberg
Madolin: Alan Senauke
Guitar: John Sholle
Bass: Charlie Russell
Viola: Peter Hornbeck

JAN HERMAN
One video.

"Notre Dame de Video"
Recorded live at Herman's Paris flat (16 rue Cels, Paris 14e) in March, 1972. Approx. 20 minutes.

I made this video piece for the group show "Trois Soirs Parmi" at 19 Quai Bourbon, Paris 4e, on March 17, 1972. The show included live performances by Jochen Gerz, Françoise Janicot, and others.

BERNARD HEIDSIECK
One video.

Heidsieck performing his sound/action poetry.

Recorded live at Heidsieck's Paris flat (19 Quai Bourbon, Paris 4e) in March, 1972. Approx. 20 minutes.

ALISON KNOWLES
One video.

Knowles performing "The Identical Lunch"
Recorded live at Goddard College (Vermont) in March, 1973. Approx. 20 minutes.

GROUPE DZIGA VERTOV
One video.

Groupe Dziga Vertov Notebooks
Recorded live at Herman's Paris flat (16 rue Cels, Paris 14e) on Nov. 30, 1971. Approx. 20 minutes.

A documentation of notebooks that were written in collaboration with Jean-Luc Goddard, preparatory to making several films in 1968. Rafael Sorin, a member of GDV and a literary critic/journalist, provided the notebooks for documentation. He narrates the video. Background music is by James Moody and Co.

POP SAMPLER
One video.

Recorded live at the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne on Sept. 19, 1971. Approx. 20 minutes.

From the collection of Ludwig Sammlung, works by various artists such as Lichtenstein, Warhol, Vostell, Rauschenberg, Wesselman, Indiana, Spoerri, Tinguely, others. Narrated by Herman.

DANIEL SPOERRI
One video

Spoerri performing "Eat Art" (with Richard Lindner).
Recorded on Oct. 3, 1971, from a program entitled "Changes" on German Southwest Radio (3rd Programme). Approx. 15 minutes.

Postscript: All of these tapes are now on file here at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library, in Evanston, Illinois.

Posted by jherman at 10:15 AM

March 28, 2006

FOREVER AND A DAY

Today is Nelson Algren's birthday. A writer of genius, he died on May 9, 1981, at the age of 72. The Algren I knew late in his life was brave, big-hearted, and staunch in his beliefs. We had become friends after I interviewed him for a piece that ran in the Sunday magazine of the Chicago Sun-Times. By the time he died I had joined the Sun-Times staff as an arts reporter and critic. This story ran in the paper eight days after his death.

'In' at last: Nelson Algren's final happy days

Multitudes have mounted this midnight stair ... all come in search of love with money in their pockets.
--from The Devil’s Stocking

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- Nelson Algren had given up on the literary establishment so long ago -- and it so clearly had given up on him -- that he was dumbfounded to learn of his election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

"I thought it was something like the Mark Twain Society where you had to pay to get in," he kidded me recently.

His first impulse was to scan the Academy membership list for the name of a well-known critic he loved to hate.

"I figured if he was in, it had to be a fraud," said Algren. "But there were some names I respected. So I asked Gloria Jones (widow of novelist James Jones) what it was and she said, 'Hell, it's like the French Legion of Honor. You're in.'"

For Algren there were few things worse than being "in." Buying your way in was one. Not getting what you deserved for your writing was another. Better to be "out" and to let your work go unpublished. Still, Algren was pleased by the surprise. He had done nothing wrong he could think of that had got him in. More important, it might help him launch his first novel in 25 years, The Devil's Stocking, which had just made the rounds of American publishers and had brought insultingly small offers.

He was to appear in the Academy induction ceremony next Wednesday. "Will you have to wear a tuxedo?" I teased.

"No," he said. "I will be required to wear a leotard and play a flute. They do this every year in a sort of garden."

"You're going to have a hard time getting the leotard over that belly of yours," I said.

He chortled.

When I asked if he would sit for an interview, and put me in touch with the friends he'd made since moving to Sag Harbor a year ago, he went one better.

"I'll make a party," he said.

Piece of cake. Quotes would fly through his house, freshly minted by Kurt Vonnegut and Peter Mathiessen and Irwin Shaw and Betty Friedan. I flew to New York and drove three hours out to Sag Harbor near the tip of Long Island. The party was set for 2 p.m. Algren was expecting me at 1.

I called from a phone booth a few blocks from his small saltbox house. No answer. When Algren threw a party, he usually piled on the chips and Fritos. He was out buying them now, I thought. I bought a bottle of Chivas Regal. Then I called again. Roy Finer answered.

"Don't come," Finer said. "He's gone."

Whenever Algren threw a party, he invited Finer, a New York City homicide detective he affectionately called "The Big Cop."

"I walked in the door less than five minutes ago," said Finer. "He's cold."

Suddenly understanding, I hung up and jumped into the car.

"We won’t see Nelson?" asked my six-year-old daughter, Olivia, whom Algren had dubbed "my fiancée" when she began sending him drawings, which he framed for his wall.

Nobody will ever see Nelson Algren again. I felt as if I'd been swept off a cliff. I couldn't believe he was dead until I saw for myself. In the bathroom Algren had collapsed of a heart attack. The smashed dial of his wristwatch was stopped at 6:05. When I came out, Finer was slumped on the living room couch. He looked very tired.

"It's over," he said.

The words were an epitaph, simple and terrible and true. Life had gone out of the house. Time might as well have stopped in each room, which brimmed with reminders of Algren's insomniac energy.

Every corner was filled, every wall covered, with mementos he made or gathered: collages of Simone de Beauvoir's letters and book jackets; photos of Algren in Army uniform; pictures of his girl friends, of prizefighters, drawings and art posters; shelves filled with books he wrote, those he read and those he wrote about; the complete works of Dickens and a portrait of Dostoevsky (his two favorite writers); the works of George Orwell; news clippings framed and yellowing with age.

The Sag Harbor police chief, John Harrington, took off his gold-braided cap and stared in awe at the hundreds of books. "I used to know John Steinbeck, who lived around here," he said. "You'd never know the guy could write from talking to him. I never heard of this guy Algren. I saw him around, though, down at the grocery. He was always buying saltines. You work in New York?"

"Yes," said Finer. "Where's the medical examiner? I came from the city to get away from the bodies."

I remembered driving with Algren in Hackensack, N.J., not long after we'd first met in September, 1978. He told me he was fed up with people asking to write his biography. "I've got 10 good years of writing left," he said.

And I'm certain he believe it. He always told me he was "a glorified reporter." He had to observe real life before he could fictionalize. So he was writing in his head, even when he wasn't.

His ex-wife, Betty Algren, an actress living in New York and to whom I had to break the news, remembered he wrote 24 hours a day.

"He had no schedule," she said. "He'd wake up in the middle of the night and go to the typewriter for three minutes, then go back to bed. We had separate bedrooms right from the beginning, which took me by surprise. Of course, I always knew that Nelson valued his independence."

That dovetailed with what Nelson had told me of his work habits. Writing and marriage just couldn't mix, because if a writer is any good, he's always in training. So he preferred the bachelor's life.

Nevertheless, for years he avoided writing "the big book." He didn't need much money to live, and he'd already had plenty of glory. Why put in the rounds religiously?

But he kept at it anyway, returning to the typewriter as though he were "on a long chain." During the past few years, to fill in the night hours when he couldn't sleep, he wrote a 465-page manuscript called Chinatown. When it was still unfinished, he gave it to me to read. I thought the title a problem and told him so. Where did it come from?

"One morning I woke up, and there it was in the typewriter," he said, scratching his head. "It was the only word on the page. That had to mean something. So I thought I should set the book in Chinatown. Now I've got to find a Chinese prostitute. The book needs a love story to round it out."

New York's Chinatown created problems for him. He couldn't find the right prostitute for a model, and the locale was too unfamiliar to master quickly. So the novel began to shift to Times Square, which he knew better. He began calling it "my Times Square novel," though much of it also takes place in New Jersey, where he had moved from Chicago in 1975 to cover the murder trial of former middleweight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.

On weekends, Algren would take a cheap hotel room and spend his time roaming 42nd Street looking for a prostitute he could talk to. One thing that complicated his search was New York mayor Ed Koch's bright idea of publicizing a citywide "john list" to discourage prostitution. The mayor guessed that customers would be frightened off by the prospect of having their names broadcast on the air.

Outraged by this cynical exploitation of middle-class fears, Algren volunteered to head the list. He dashed off letters to the mayor, the newspapers and radio stations. No answer.

Worse, the "john list" forced his Japanese girlfriend, a prostitute he saw regularly in Manhattan, to leave the city because of increased raids and lack of customers. Algren never forgave the mayor for that.

In the end, Algren succeeded in his search. He found "a brown-skin girl" who worked in a cheap midtown whorehouse and talked to her at length for the going rate. She became Dovie-Jean Dawkins, who "had a broad face with high cheekbones, which lent her an Oriental aspect. She looked to be 18 at most." In fact, the novel took its final title from her phrase for her boyfriend. "You're like the devil's stocking, Tiger," she tells him. "You're knitted backwards."

I liked the book so much that I got in touch with my friend Carl Weissner, a leading German translator who specialized in non-mainstream American literature. In no time Weissner interested a West German publisher in bringing out this fall not only The Devil's Stocking [it was published in Germany with the title Calhoun], but in following up with a complete retrospective of Algren's works in new translations.

"Why did we ever go to war with the Krauts?" Algren would joke after hearing from Weissner, whose good news buoyed him as nothing else had in months. He hoped the German interest would rekindle sales of his Italian editions, which paid small but steady royalties.

As for his own countrymen, Algren said: "The Americans will have to pay a hundred thousand, or they won't get it."

This was not just sheer bravado, though Algren had his fair share of that. He wanted the money to buy a house on the beach. He was tired of tramping around with cardboard boxes of books and pictures. In Hackensack, neighbors once called the police to have him clear his porch of what they called "an unsightly mess."

Later in Southampton, a posh resort near Sag Harbor, he unwisely chose a place so small and dainty that when he tried to move his boxes in it gave his landlady fits. She had him evicted in a week.

I wired him $500 so he could rent an attic in Sag Harbor while he dickered with his landlady, her real estate agent and their banker over the security deposit. It was a point of pride with Algren that he repaid his loans in full, and quickly [when he had the money]. Often he would spend $25 on a meal for you without blinking an eye, though he'd go home with $2 in his pocket.

The first place he moved to in Sag Harbor also would not hold all of his belongings. He had to leave them in storage. When he finally moved last September to his place on Glover Street, he unpacked at last and settled in like a squire on his estate. He loved the place, and it loved him back.

And for the first time in years he acquired a social life among literary friends, among them Gloria Jones, Peter Matthiessen, Kurt Vonnegut, Joe Pintauro, William Gaddis, Betty Friedan, Robert Parrish and Irwin Shaw.

He was happier in Sag Harbor, where he now lies buried in a whaler's grave, than he probably had been for a decade. Maybe Shaw, on learning of Algren’s death, said it best: "It's not so bad. He'd just won a big award and he was about to mix drinks at a party. Now he won't have to wash the glasses."

Algren would have been tickled.

Posted by jherman at 9:05 AM

March 27, 2006

NO. 1 WITH A BULLET

The American viceroy in Iraq has changed his tune about the death squads. Zalmay Khalilzad "is now saying that militias are Iraq's No. 1 security threat," Jeffrey Gettleman reported in his striking front-page story on Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times, "Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad."

And again in another front-pager this morning, "Shiite Fighters Clash With G.I.'s and Iraqi Forces," Gettleman reports: "American officials are now saying that Shiite militias are the No. 1 problem in Iraq, more dangerous than the Sunni-led insurgents who for nearly the past three years have been branded the gravest security threat."

Golly gee willikers, as Rummy Boy might say. Wasn't it Khalilzad, widely hailed in press reports as the U.S. diplomatic genius of last resort, who not so long ago showed less than urgent concern for the problem of the death squads? According to Jon Lee Anderson's lengthy New Yorker profile of him in December, as reported here:

When a Sunni politician came to his office in the Green Zone and told him the Shiite militias "were a greater problem than the insurgency ... Khalilzad raised his eyebrows with interest ... acknowledged that militias were a problem." But, hélas, he had another, more "immediate concern" (terrorists from Syria, who are actually a small fraction of the insurgents according to the U.S. military's own estimate).

Need we be reminded yet again of "the Salvador option" hidden in plain sight? Or the bold-faced contradictions of the American 'ganda machine? Or the Bullshitter-in-Chief's latest phony claims of progress?

If Gettleman needed a reminder, he got one on his return to Iraq two weeks ago after being away for more than a year.

In a third stunning report published over the weekend, he noted: "The first story I covered began with a tip that vigilantes had hanged four suspected terrorists from lamp posts in Sadr City, a Shiite slum. The minute I got to the scene, I realized I was stepping into a new Iraq."

What made it "new" was that the death squads now have free reign, unfettered by governmental restraints and encouraged more than ever by religious and sectarian differences. He writes:

The day after that mob scene in Sadr City, bodies started showing up, first a couple and then dozens. By conservative counts, nearly 200 civilian men have been executed in the past two weeks and dumped on Baghdad's streets. Many have been hogtied. Some have had acid splashed on their faces. Others have been found without toes, fingers, eyes.

Granted, Baghdad is no stranger to the corpse. There were assassinations two years ago, when an entire intellectual class was being wiped out.

But this new wave of executions was different. It was more sadistic and less selective. These people weren't rounded up because they were important. They were tortured and killed simply because of their religion. And because most of them were Sunni Muslim Arabs, there was no response from the Shiite-led government.

Mass murder used to provoke some form of official reaction, however feeble. I remember seeing the Iraqi police seal off areas after big bomb attacks and poke around for evidence. Now, there are major crimes with no crime scenes. Very few of these mystery killings have been investigated, and it isn't for lack of witnesses. Many of these men were abducted in daylight, in public, in front of crowds.

Gettleman is not the first or the only reporter to describe what's been happening, of course. But his reports, which offer unusual intimacy and insight, drive home the criminal reality of the Iraq war. If Americans are finally turning against the war, it's because reports like his have exposed its moral bankruptcy.

Posted by jherman at 9:09 AM

March 26, 2006

GROCK!

Ever hear of Grock, the Swiss circus clown? I never did, until composer friend Bill Osborne filled me in. As another friend of mine says, "Swiss clown? Normally a contradiction in terms, like Swiss Navy. But this guy's brilliant." Have a look. Here are some short, terrifically entertaining video clips of Grock, beautifully reproduced and posted by Osborne on his and musician-actor-artist Abbie Conant's Web site. You won't be sorry -- and you don't even have to know about "Sequenza V," Luciano Berio's trombone tribute to Grock, which is their reason for posting the videos.

By the way, Conant and Osborne are in the midst of a tour of U.S. universities in the Northeast and Midwest. They're performing two of their multimedia works, "Cybeline" and "Music for the End of Time." This week they'll be in Ohio at Kenyon College (Tuesday) and Miami University (Wednesday). In case you didn't know, Malcolm Gladwell summarized the story of Conant's Munich Philharmonic audition to wrap up his latest best seller, "Blink." Conant herself didn't know he'd written it up until a friend told her. Here's the complete version of the story, which Gladwell cites -- how she won a blind audition for principle trombonist (besting 32 male trombonists) and how she then had to confront the orchestra's entrenched sexism.

Posted by jherman at 10:41 AM

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

Reprinted from the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times

BOOKS

Algren's 'Wild Side' still rocks

March 26, 2006

By JAN HERMAN

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, A Walk on the Wild Side. The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

When it first appeared, in 1956, the literary critics mostly told Algren to take a hike, and for the many years since, they've mostly ignored him and it. Now the British have brought out a 50th anniversary edition of Walk. Richard Flanagan, a formidable novelist himself, recently noted in the (London) Telegraph that it "made a mockery of the American dream. Set among the pimps, whores and con men of New Orleans, it was a brave --- and prescient -- expose of the nation's contempt for its own people." Small wonder the lit crits of the '50s dismissed it.

"It's the 'kill the messenger' syndrome, I suppose, for the news that Algren's work brings us is not good news," another remarkable novelist, Russell Banks, has written.

Apparently the British -- not to mention the Australians (Flanagan is one) -- don't mind reading Algren's bad news. Last year the Brits brought out a new edition of an earlier Algren novel, The Man With the Golden Arm, the one that made him famous for a while. But if they have a history of appreciating Algren, so do savvy Americans. Although Walk and Arm have both been out of print from time to time on this side of the pond, they're available these days in trade paperback editions. (Walk has a foreword by Banks, and Arm has memoirs by Studs Terkel and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as essays and appreciations by Mike Royko and others.) Seven Stories Press has also re-issued a handful of other Algren titles.

A savage work of tragicomic satire, Walk is tenderized by the sympathy Algren feels for an illiterate Texas drifter at its center, Dove Linkhorn, a big, dumb, freckled naif "who could not remember a time, a place nor a single person, house cat or hound dog that had sought his affection." Dove's innocence is turned upside down when he rapes the first woman who, by seducing him, shows him any feeling. And he loses whatever innocence is left when he becomes a New Orleans peep-show stud after failing as a door-to-door salesman of French Dripolator coffee pots and counterfeit certificates for a "free finger wave and shampoo at the Madam Dewberry Beauty Shop."

Algren's compassion extends even to the least likable of the creatures in Walk. Depression-era vagrants all: Dove's father, for instance, a mean, Bible-spouting drunk who preaches anti-Catholic screed and hellfire warnings about "the doc-treen of evolution" from the courthouse steps of Arroyo (population 955) in the Rio Grande Valley.

But as the novel's very first sentence tells us: "'He's just a pore lonesome wife-left feller,' the more understanding said of Fritz Linkhorn, 'losin' his wife is what crazied him.'' It goes deeper than that, of course, and further back. The elder Linkhorn "came of a shambling race," we learn. "That gander-necked clan from which Calhoun and Jackson sprang. Jesse James' and Jeff Davis' people. Lincoln's people. Forest solitaries spare and swart, left landless in sandland and Hooverville now the time of the forests had passed."

Few critics had the slightest inkling, much less an understanding, of characters such as Fritz Linkhorn (they somehow managed to forget Huck Finn's Pappy) or the oddballs who surround Dove -- Kitty Twist, Legless Schmidt, Oliver Finnerty, Reba, Hallie -- people Algren called "the broken men and breaking ones; wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes; cokies and queers and threadbare whores," as Flanagan reminds us. And, Flanagan adds, all of them are "in search of America, only for the reader to discover that they are America."

The literary historian Maxwell Geismar was an exception, according to Algren biographer Bettina Drew. Reviewing Walk in the Nation, a leftist weekly, Geismar praised it as a "surrealist comedy of life in the gutter." But the establishment critics dismissed it. In the New York Times Book Review, Drew notes, Alfred Kazin wrote, "I do not think it has anything real about it whatsoever. ... It is just picaresque." The Times' daily reviewer, Orville Prescott, piled on, calling it overwritten as well as unreal. And in the left-wing Partisan Review, where Algren might have expected a sympathetic hearing, the academician Leslie Fiedler insulted him as "the bard of the stumblebum."

Following the failure of Walk, Algren's life "took an increasingly tragic turn," Flanagan points out. That's exactly right. As Vonnegut has written: "Like James Joyce, he had become an exile from his homeland after writing that his neighbors were perhaps not as noble and intelligent and kindly as they liked to think they were." Furthermore, Vonnegut has promoted him whenever he could in literary quarters that Algren spurned out of contempt and humiliation; he has also paid homage to Algren as his literary superior, which is no small thing.

Of all Algren's writer friends, however, Terkel probably understood and appreciated him best. He knew Algren longest, shared his Chicago roots and radical sensibility, and lent him money. Lots of it. He still held an IOU for $3,000 when Algren died, in 1981. Terkel was bemused when he told me the heirs to Algren's estate had declined to pay it off because it wasn't notarized. Why, he wanted to know, would a man who didn't bother to make a will have bothered to notarize an IOU? It was, Terkel added, the final irony of Algren's funny, sad, glorious, tragicomic life.

Jan Herman, a former Sun-Times reporter, blogs at artsjournal.com. He is the author of A Talent for Trouble, a biography of Hollywood director William Wyler.

Posted by jherman at 9:22 AM

March 19, 2006

EHRENSTEIN SINGS OUT

I shoulda known not to recommend "The Stuff That Happened" as a righteously wicked NYT editorial on the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Even with its MSM waffling ("For the present, our goal must be to minimize the damage ..."), I thought he'd go for it. Boy, was I wrong.

Here's what came back from my comrade in blogs. Citation and verse:

"In their wishful thinking, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld undoubtedly tell themselves what they tell us: that the Iraqi people are better off than they were under the brutal dictator, that the Iraqi security forces are gradually learning how to take over defense of their own country and that a unified government is still a good possibility."

That's the NYT's wishful thinking too. But Unindicted Co-Conspirators always move to cover their own asses first.

"The Iraq debacle ought to serve as a humbling lesson for future generations of American leaders -- although, if our leaders were capable of being humbled, they could have simply looked back to Vietnam."

YA THINK?

Gee, Why didn't the NYT do that? Why didn't the NYT tell Judy Chalabi to go fuck her smug little self?

(Crickets chirping)

-- David Ehrenstein

Yeah, Rose, he's singin' out.

Posted by jherman at 2:04 PM

March 15, 2006

THE GOOD OLD BAD OLD DAYS

Long ago in San Francisco -- the year was 1969 -- John Bryan and I put together an issue of Notes From Underground³. As you can see, it had a self-mocking cartoon cover (by Gary Grimshaw, our "art director"), which showed a newsie shouting, "REVO LOO-SHUN!!" while hawking the Daily Grind. I don't know if you can make it out, but the front page of the Daily Grind is illustrated by a pig-faced plainclothes cop in a pork pie hat offering the peace sign. The news stories above the fold are headlined "OINK" and "BLAH BLAH."

The issue led off with an article by Jerry Rubin (in his anarcho-leftist phase), "The Thoughts of Chairman Jerry," which began:

We of the white middle class are not children of violence. But increasingly, day by day, we are becoming enemies of a system whose basic means of control is violence, or the threat of violence. One never knows if he is going to return from a demonstration anymore with his precious head in one piece.

Rubin's article was illustrated by another Grimshaw cartoon, which showed what the demonstrations were about and again mocked the contradictory nature of the times.

A middle-class shopper in the supermarket is staggered by the produce in the meat department. "OMYGOD!!!" She can take her pick of fresh Dead Vietnam Babies 29¢ lb. and U.S. Choice Ground Pigburger 89¢ lb. Her shopping cart is filled with goods, one of them brand-named Junk. The shelves behind her are stocked with Goo, Zip, Fuz and Poo.

The second article, by Charles Bukowski, was called "Should We Burn Uncle Sam's Ass?" It began:

Or will he burn ours? I'll be 50 in August so don't trust me. That's 20 years over 30, and I wonder who the boys under 30 are going to trust when they are over 30? But maybe you ought to trust me a little ...

We were self-mocking but serious. Bukowski's piece was followed by Allen Ginsberg's poem, "Violence," which was followed by White Panther Party founder John Sinclair's "Letters from Prison," then by "Student Revolutionary Poems" written during the 1968 student strike at San Francisco State.

And we were arty.

We printed Fluxus writer Dick Higgins's letter to French "happener" Jean-Jacques Lebel, "On the Artist as Revolutionary"; Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem, "In a Time of Revolution, For Instance"; Harold Norse's article, "Cyanide Genocide"; a Lenore Kandel poem, which began: "I offer you one hundred ways of love"; an illustrated game of revolution, "Us & Them"; two poems by Nanos Valaoritis; Jack Micheline's poem, "Five Generations of Freaks"; a cutup by Carl Weissner and yours truly, "If the Revolution Fails"; a reprint of William S. Burroughs's "After the Inauguration," and Sinclair Beiles's comical tales from a mental ward:

In the washroom I reckoned the specific gravity of my fellow inmates' urine by floating bottles of it in a washbasin alongside bottles holding the same quantity of water. The nurses were suitably impressed. From then on I was Dr. Beiles who had taken his medical degree in Cairo.

And, because we were also psychedelic, we featured the Notes from Underground "Psychedelic Cookbook," which provided formulas for synthesizing mescaline and LSD. Oh yeah. And what have we got to show for it? The bad old new days. Oh yeah.

Postscript: If you think Grimshaw's supermarket cartoon is overstated, Bob Herbert has news for you about "an ocean of blood" in Iraq.

Posted by jherman at 12:28 PM

March 13, 2006

THE COPYCAT AND THE ORIGINAL CAT

Is there a difference between appropriation and exploitation? Interpretation and imitation? Real live originality and gold-plated copycatting? Even in a postmodern world where the difference is sometimes hard to figure, I'd say there is.

Do you see any similarities in the images below? Three are by Norman O. Mustill, from "Flypaper" (1967) and "Twinpak" (1969). Three are by Vik Muniz, from a fashion spread that appeared in The New York Times Style Magazine (Dec. 5, 2005).

The similarities, though not exact, are so striking when taken together that if Muniz's images and techniques are not plagiarized from Mustill's, they bear what Martin Fuller calls in the context of architecture "the onus of plagiarism." That is, they are imitations, whether acknowledged or not. And they can't be claimed as postmodern appropriations because by definition appropriation art is intended to deconstruct, parody or otherwise comment on well-known cultural icons -- Mickey Mouse, for instance, or the Mona Lisa.

Shortly after The Times fashion spread appeared, I raised this issue with the editors of the magazine. After three months of stonewalling, they finally got back to me. The magazine's photography director, Kathy Ryan, who worked on the spread with Muniz, a currently "hot" self-described copycatter, said: "The similarities are a coincidence." She said Muniz told her he doesn't know Mustill's work.

OK, they're a coincidence. But to be fair to Mustill, a currently "not hot" original cat, how about allowing a letter to be published in the magazine noting the similarities with matching illustrations? Can't be done, she said. So much time has passed, it wouldn't make sense. (Blame the victim, anyone?) I guess I'll have to blog about this, I said. Fine, she said, no problem.

So have a look at the evidence.

Exhibit A: On the left, Mustill (from 39 years ago). On the right, Muniz (from three months ago). In this case, notice the exact material: tree branches within a human form in the context of a fashion statement and the referential hand.

Speaking of coincidence, here's what Muniz writes in "Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer" (2005), a book that serves as his manifesto: "Copying has been an extensive part of my work as an artist …"

Mustill comments: "Ape artist perhaps. D'ya think he believes this admission gives him carte blanche to rip off anyone and anything he surveys?"

Exhibit B: On the left, Mustill (from 37 years ago). On the right, Muniz (from three months ago). In this case, notice the technique combining newsprint and human figure cutouts.

Muniz writes: "I have always believed individuality to be more important than originality in art making. … When I worked in advertising, the rule was not to use any new idea that hadn't been tested by an artist before. Everything was borrowed or stolen."

Mustill comments: "So much for originalité artistique. Puts the whole fucking rumble into its proper perspective. He's still working in advertising."

Exhibit C: On the left, Mustill (from 39 years ago). On the right, Muniz (from three months ago). In this case, notice the reversal of imagery: the house as background vs. the house within the figure. (And how about the thematic reversal: ludicrous preening vs. fashionable tailoring?)

Muniz writes: "I guess that's how creativity develops: whenever you are doing something good, first people ignore you, then they antagonize you, and finally they copy you. …"

Mustill comments: "'cept to have my work morphed, reinterpreted, redeployed, and included (anonymously) among the famous, is no comfort at all.”

Incidental intelligence: The "O" in Norman O. Mustill stands for "Ogue," a single-word manifesto. When he took the middle name years ago, by dropping the "V" from Vogue, it made the point that ... oh, never mind, if you don't get it, there's no point explaining it ... Suffice to say, it underscores a special irony of the Muniz "coincidence."

Posted by jherman at 8:23 AM

March 10, 2006

HERE'S A STRETCH

Almost forgot about The Armory Show 2006, which steams into New York with a flotilla of international art galleries and thousands of artworks (purported and otherwise).

As Holland Cotter reports in this morning's New York Times, there will be a boatload of special events, like Critical Conversations in a Limo, a series of "intimate chats between V.I.P.'s and critics and curators for hire held in cars zipping between the Armory Show and DIVA, the Digital and Video Art Fair, one of several concurrent fairs in the city."

One of those critical conversationalists in the white stretch limo will be yours truly, thanks to an invitation from Holly Crawford, who organized the event. I don't know her, never met her. But she invited me, gawd help her. I'll letcha know what happens.

Posted by jherman at 9:32 AM

DEAR DIARY

Three days away from the blog means so little in the scheme of things that I'm betting you didn't notice. Anyway, Paul Krugman's column caught my attention this morning. Headlined "The Conservative Epiphany," it talks about "conservative commentators who have finally realized that [the Bullshitter-in-Chief's] administration isn't trustworthy." But, it adds,

we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says that there's something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by [the Bullshitter-in-Chief's] deceptions, even though the administration's mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

My ears perks up at the word "mendacity."

Need I say it reminded me of TED SORENSEN'S ITALICS? ("I have lived a long time," he said, "and I have seen a lot of administrations. But I have never seen an administration as incompetent -- and as mendacious -- as this one.")

Since Krugman's column is unavailable to the unwashed unsubscribed, I thought I'd mention the salient passages. According to the conventional wisdom,

if you're a former [Bullshitter-in-Chief] supporter who now says, as [Bruce] Bartlett did at the Cato [Institute], that "the administration lies about budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been saying that since the early days of the [Bullshitter's] administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of [the Bullshitter] who now says, as [Andrew] Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this administration have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when [the Bullshitter] had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

The truth is that everything the new wave of [the Bullshitter's] critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts.

Amen to that, not for the first time, a'course, as subsequently amended.

Posted by jherman at 8:53 AM

March 7, 2006

FOR THE LOVE OF ALGREN

Nelson Algren's "A Walk on the Wild Side" is one of the great American novels of the 20th century. The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Ave (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

When "Walk" first appeared, in 1956, the literary critics pretty much told Algren to take a hike, and for the many years since, they've pretty much ignored him and it. Now the British have brought out a 50th anniversary edition. Richard Flanagan, writing in The Telegraph, notes that the novel "made a mockery of the American dream. Set among the pimps, whores and con men of New Orleans, it was a brave -- and prescient -- exposé of the nation's contempt for its own people." Small wonder the lit crits of the '50s dismissed it.

Last year the Brits also brought out a new edition of an earlier novel, "The Man With the Golden Arm," the one that made Algren famous for a while. Apparently Brits who like to read the real thing, not to mention Aussies (Flanagan is one), have a history of appreciating him.

But so do savvy Americans. Although "Walk" and "Arm" have both been out of print from time to time on this side of the pond, they're available again in trade paperback editions ("Walk" with a remarkable appreciation by Russell Banks, "Arm" with memoirs by Studs Terkel and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as essays and appreciations by Mike Royko, John Clellon Holmes and Maxwell Geismar). Seven Stories Press has also re-issued a handful of other titles.

Flanagan's take on Algren's life and work is exactly right. Go read it. Before you do, though, have a look at a personal reminiscence of the man himself by Roger Groening, an old friend of Algren's, who writes that "if he'd never written a word, he would have been a spectacular human being." Which is not to suggest anything remotely saccharine.

AMATEUR NIGHT WAY OUT EAST

By Roger Groening

"It's a mean, sick city," Nelson Algren wrote me after arriving as a correspondent for the Atlantic in Saigon late in 1968. "Poverty, pimpery, parades, Col. Ky, thousands of cowboys on Hondas with nothing to do all day and night but race the streets. And the American GI's who want to go home. And the people wishing the hell they would go home. The Americans are definitely not liked here.

"What the war is about isn't what the papers say it's about. It's not about freedom, love of country, national pride, or democracy. It's about the Vietnamese, American, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Australian, and Indian businessmen making a very fast, fat buck and wanting it to last and last."

And always dreaming of the fast buck himself -- having seen writers not good enough to write his laundry lists make millions -- it was only days before the old blackmarketeer, the nylon, cigarette and Eisenhower jacket king of Marseilles found his chance.

"Meanwhile," he continued, "I want to get hold of a few American C-notes. Do you have any? A C is worth about $190 in piasters. More if you risk going into the streets after it. I'm not quite out of C-notes, and also have Traveler's Checks -- highly negotiable -- but am holding them out of circulation so as to have something to get out of town with in a hurry, if need be.

"If you have a C -- one -- and have it to spare, you might do this: slip it -- WITHOUT FOLDING -- into a sheet of carbon paper with the inky side out. Then scratch some words of wisdom, in that fine Italian hand, onto a letter and send the whole mess to me at the above address."

The Eric Ambler tone was new and so was the hint of complicity, but the request for a loan came as no surprise. I'd lent Nelson money a few times before, and when he was flush he always repaid me promptly. I couldn't have guessed that this loan would take him years to pay back, or that those years would be so filled with disappointment and hard, unforgiving times.

"Another helpful item would be a little book of UN repeat UN-personalized checks. I have the personalized kind myself but there might be a kickback there. Send them separately, if you have any handy."

Obviously, this Algren was preparing to engage in some serious action, knew the nature of the task ahead and the tools required. "He's come to the right man," I said to my wife. "The guy's a criminal wizard." She didn't agree, I remember. In fact, she threatened to cut me up small, real small, she said, like a boarding-house pie, when I announced I was going to the bank. But the intrigue, the possibility of sure-fire second-hand adventure, the very idea of the thing, the daring of the concept, was irresistible. With clandestine delight, I followed my confederate's instructions. Fingers crossed, my wife's eyes hooded, I set myself to wait patiently, bravely, come what may.

I didn't have to wait long.

"The C-note came through!" shouted the news from Saigon. "The carbon paper tip, which an Australian hustler gave me, actually works. There is no such think as putting a trailer on a letter here -- if, when held up to the light, a check, money order or cash shows through, you don't get it, and that's it.

"I'm highly pleased at my ingenuity and at your recklessness."

So was I.

"Anyhow," he calculated, "I'll get 20,000 Vietnamese dollars with your C. With the V money I'll buy MPC (Military Payment Certificates), paying 17,000 for a hundred in MPC." Master of his subject and even its lingo, Nelson A. was expert and clearly at ease in the shadow world. "MPC is the real money here because it is the only money negotiable in the American PX's. And the American PX's, of course, are the source of everything the blackmarket requires: cameras, typewriters, tape recorders, record players, etc. These sell cheap in the PX and sell dear on the market.

"Can you spare some more C's?"

So, along with what at the time I believed to be a half-dozen or so others, I cast my vote for the free enterprise system and became an investor in one dandy small businessman. Nelson stopped covering the war. He left Saigon only once to observe troop activities in the jungle by air. Some shots were fired and his plane damaged. Convinced that there was a real enemy out there intent on killing him, he retreated, permanently. "I'm living in Cholon, which is poorer and more colorful than Saigon. It's where the hoods operate. The real war is being fought around the Cholon PX," he announced.

I really didn't know Nelson Algren very well in 1968, not as I was to later. We'd corresponded for a few years, talked frequently on the telephone, and met half-a-dozen times in New York and Chicago, where I'd stayed with him for a few days the year before. I was amazed by the speed and ferocity of his intelligence and his wild uncontrolled humor and enthusiasm, and touched by his warm interest in someone who was little more than a kid, and by his kindness. Having listened to him recall his adventures in Marseilles after the war [WWII], I thought it very unlikely he'd be outsmarted in this new scheme, but I did warn him to be wary, for surely there were dangerous factors at play in that midnight city. After all, it didn't take any great perception to conclude that whoever his associates were, they operated not for a brief triumphant score, a substantial grubstake, but to survive in a vicious and wasted, thoroughly amoral, almost anarchic country. Nelson wanted only to out-guile the Orient and raise money to buy a not so little house somewhere by the ocean, a wish he frequently expressed, and which he innocently believed this opportunity in Vietnam was heaven-sent to make concrete. They had to be playing strictly for keeps and a single day. Smug and intrepid, he wrote back to reassure me:

I fear no oriental scamp. I learned how to handle them watching Wallace Reid handle Dr. Fu Manchu. Later I found certain flaws in Warner Oland and Roland Winters. Thanks for the C's and your confidence.

Do you have anymore? There's a deal I hate to pass up on electric typewriters.

And so on.

What he did, of course, was reinvest whatever I sent him and the considerable profits of up to a thousand percent and maybe even more per item back into the enterprise. At the end he must have been dealing with a classical American buck and certainly a fortune in piasters.

We can consider, then, the bizarre spectacle of Nelson Algren, the first National Book Award winner, Hemingway's best bet for the future of American letters, skulking every day in the streets of Cholon, Major Algren (his official press identity, and it pleased him greatly), hawking his various PX-purchased wares, buttonholing strangers, cajoling them with unforgotten carny rhapsodies of Sony and Ampex, Leica and Nicon, Olivetti and Remington, Webcor and Magnavox, Kool's, Winston's, Salem's, Zenith! Then, having snared his wide-eyed, unsuspecting mark, guiding hand on the buyer's elbow, quickly up to his living quarters and storeroom for the exchange.

(Having failed over the course of three years to make PFC in WWII, due, he claimed, to his unwillingness to assume the responsibility, his sudden leap in rank reflected careful study and analysis of Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest's Civil War campaigns.)

The scheme sounded too good, too easy, much too risky to possibly last. The Vietnam experience, looking back, seems to be prophetically emblematic of the years to come. The childlike credulity that made him accept some ludicrous tales, the strange savvy innocence and unquestioning openness to experience that was his great gift as a writer, his dreaming longing, didn't serve him well in Vietnam. (We had a furious argument in 1970 when I questioned his assertion that Mike Nichols was making $1,000,000 a day. He also believed that the Chicago heavyweight who was KO'd in 1940 by Joe Louis and the current country and western singer Johnny Paycheck were the same man.) He was, as it turned out, dealing with folks who would reflexively kill, if other measures failed. They didn't fail with Nelson. Details are sketchy, but after what appears to have been a contest of wits about price in a dispute with a particularly greedy and nasty duo, he was savagely beaten and robbed, and he left Saigon broke and in need of dentures.

Still, he wouldn't or couldn't entertain the notion that he wasn’t a natural, high-style criminal, the hustler's hypnotic hustler. Failure in Cholon was the fault of the Vietnamese. From Hong Kong: "Finally surfaced after those months under the stagnant waters of Saigon," he wrote. "Coming up on the Kowloon side is like returning to the living. O those Vietnamese! I guess my basic gripe about them -- beyond the slyness, the mischievousness, the abject servility, the listlessness and the dispirited air -- is really that they're so goddam unoriginal. They just keep saying 'Numba one, Give me kendy, numba ten, Zippo lighter, give cigarette, Coca-Cola, me wuv you too much ...' and on and on."

Years later I found out there were no other backers. Perhaps he was refused, or simply knew no one else would support, even encourage him in such a venture.

Putting notes on Saigon together, it simmers down to very little for five months' work. You never realize how little you have, or how close you came, till after you've left a place. But I sure as hell ain't going back.

And he didn't. He came back to Chicago, and that was no longer the place for him to be. An assignment from Esquire and his own restlessness brought him to New Jersey and the sad, unproductive involvement with Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and one of the most complex, baffling, infuriating homicide cases of the decade. He carried with him from Chicago that same wounded innocence, that same naive conviction that, yes, everything is going to be fine. But nothing would ever be really fine again. Nelson Algren was truly a Thurber man. Few things ever went right for him; still, he never stopped trying. He rarely owned anything, from a toaster to a T.V. that worked or, if it did, and he hadn't been overcharged for it, that he could operate. He was also the target of improbable accusations. A lunatic landlady ejected him from his Paterson, N.J., apartment for, she claimed, running a karate school in his living room.

(The same woman persuaded the gullible and superstitious Nelson that her late husband had been driven mad by the installation of a coronary pacemaker and had perished as a result. Nelson's absolute and unquestioning belief in her story, even after she'd proven herself to be a fantasist of the first rank, and fear of consequent insanity, led him to refuse a pacemaker after a first heart attack, a decision that probably led to his death.)

Next he found a place in Hackensack and was briefly happy there, when suddenly the owner sold that building and it was eviction time again. It took him months of living amid packed corrugated cartons before he found another suitable apartment, this time in Bethpage, L.I. The moving men came and he arrived only to find the landlady there had changed her mind, and denied him entrance. This time he stayed with the movers, who compassionately took him in for over a month. And on and on.

Finally, after further bizarre comic-tragic misadventures, Nelson settled in Sag Harbor, which he loved, where nothing went smoothly either, and in which he had less than a year to live. Still, I never saw him depressed, though I knew he had to be or heard him complain without joking, and it was a rare event that didn't release an unusual observation.

Amazing weather phenomenon: a blizzard came up and, as it blizzarded, it began getting colder and colder and colder -- until the blizzard itself froze, I was looking out the window when it happened -- the snowflakes stopped in mid-air, stippling the whole city with white dots! The fire department had to come out and chop the flakes down individually, so the blizzard could get started again. Next morning I found a wolf frozen to death on the back porch. I sold the head to a friendly eskimo, who gets a bounty for it.

Or, after a good day at the races, remembering a teaching stint at the U. of Florida: "Unhappy, there's no horse track in Gainesville. They play dogs chasing a mechanical rabbit down there. No thank you -- not unless they have cats for jockeys."

And then he was dead.

With him American naturalism had its final, golden moment; his work was both poetic and hilarious in the tradition of Mark Twain, deeply disturbing and heartbreakingly beautiful. But forget the writing. Far greater than Nelson's talent was his heart, and if he'd never written a word he would have been a spectacular human being. His death was a tragic loss to the world of laughter, to the spirit and example of generosity and courage, and an irremediable aching blow to the friends who loved Nelson Algren and will miss him as long as they live.

In Notes From A Sea Diary, he posed the question: "And of the American writers of our time, which one, given a single choice, would you bring back to life?," and answered that for him it would have to be Hemingway.

Well, for me the choice is much simpler. Of all the men I've known, now gone, if I could select one to re-animate, to once again, a little grumpily, answer the phone or open the door when I rang, that would have to be Nelson Algren.

Nelson Algren all the way.

© 1988 by Roger Groening. Reprinted with the permission of the author and the Chicago Public Library, Special Collections Division, from the pamphlet "Writing in the First Person: Nelson Algren 1909-1981," which accompanied a 1988 exhibit of Algren manuscripts and memorabilia at The Chicago Public Library Cultural Center. It was organized by Laura Linard and curated by Catherine Ingraham.

Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM

March 6, 2006

JEWISH CARTOON (LAFF) RIOT

The Muslim cartoon furor just won't go away. "About 50,000 people, many chanting 'Hang those who insulted the prophet,' rallied Sunday in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi," AP reports. Another 20,000 in the eastern Turkish city of Erzurum chanted anti-Danish slogans and shouted "Allah is Great."

We've all heard about the Al Qaeda video that denounced the Mohammed cartoons. The Pakistani press has stories like this one, "Cartoons rile U.S. college." And today's Wall Street Journal front-pages the latest absurdity headlined, "Blame It on Voltaire: Muslims Ask French To Cancel 1741 Play." (No link for the unwashed unsubscribed.)

To all the rioters: Enough already! Does that sound too Jewish? Too New York? Too reasonable? How 'bout a coupla Jewish cartoons that won't cause any riots 'cept, to quote a friend, mebbe a laff riot:

Posted by jherman at 9:14 AM

March 5, 2006

THE LITTLE THINGS THAT NIGGLE

The fine art of the meaningless gesture and the empty symbol was honed to perfection with a combined "symbolic gesture" when the Bullshitter-in-Chief arrived in Pakistan the other day.

A front-page story in The New York Times on Saturday reported that he "flew directly to Islamabad aboard Air Force One," as "a symbolic gesture that he considered the country safe enough for a presidential welcome on an open tarmac, and an overnight stay."

How safe was it and how meaningful the symbolic gesture? You decide. Here was the very next paragraph:

The capital was virtually sealed for his arrival. Concrete barriers and police squads blocked off the main avenues running to Parliament, the presidential palace and the diplomatic enclave where the president stayed, leaving the streets from the airport dark and deserted.

Further down in the story (12th graf), the meaning of that symbolic gesture is more fully developed: "Air Force One approached Islamabad with its running lights off and interior shades drawn, a precaution that would make it harder for anyone trying to aim a missile at the plane." Then:

After his airport arrival was covered by local television crews, [the Bullshitter] slipped away from public view, and reporters traveling with him could not tell whether he even rode with the presidential motorcade, or in an unmarked Black Hawk helicopter, to the heavily fortified residence of the American ambassador. ...

Since everything is relative in the bizarro world of White House PR, you could call the arrival a "public landing," because unlike Clinton's flight into Islamabad six years ago, as also reported in the story, the Bullshitter was not delivered in an "unmarked military jet accompanied by a decoy plane with the familiar blue and white of Air Force One and 'United States of America' on its side."

Meanwhile, over in Iraq ...

It was reported today, also in The Times, that "units of the American-trained Iraqi Army stood aside," according to U.S. commanders, "clearing the way" for the recent Shiite reprisals against Sunnis "carried out by the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr," and other militia fighters (a k a death squads).

But y'know what?

Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, who has been accused by Sunnis of allowing Shiite death squads to operate within police ranks, said he had sent a letter to all militia groups asking them to disband, as required by the new Iraqi Constitution.

How nice of him. And better than that, according to the report,

Mr. Jabr said that he had allocated $10 million to a fund to help militia members find new jobs, including positions in the new army and police forces.

That way the army and police won't even have to stand aside to carry out reprisals. They can do it themselves with their death squads fully authorized.

Need I remind you of "the Salvador option" hidden in plain sight? Or the American general leading the multibillion-dollar effort to train and equip Iraq's police forces, who said he was heartened by Jabr's pledge to fully investigate the death squads?

Nah. These are just niggles. Why bother? Let's get to the really important stuff, like the countdown to the Oscars .

Posted by jherman at 10:17 AM

March 3, 2006

STARRY REARVIEW MIRROR

Refighting the Vietnam War is not an option. Rethinking it is. That's what they'll be doing in a star-studded, two-day conference to rival Sunday's Oscars. (Well, almost.) It's called "Vietnam and the Presidency" and will be held March 10-11 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

Who are "they"? Oh, just a few policymakers of the Vietnam era (like Kissinger and Haig), along with journalists (like Halberstam and Frances Fitzgerald), and historians (like David Kaiser and Jeffrey Kimball). Others expected to be there include Jack Valenti, Wesley Clark, Dan Rather, Bob Herbert. Even Jimmy Carter will put in an appearance (via video). And, yes, Theodore Sorensen.

You may recall Sorensen's comment the other day about the mendacity of the current U.S. regime. (How could you not?) Well, that was only part of my brief conversation with him. What I didn't mention was this exchange:

Me: Do you know Gareth Porter's book, "Perils of Dominance"?
Sorensen: No. What's it about?
Me: I think you might be interested. It's a revisionist history of the Vietnam era. It talks about President Kennedy and Vietnam. Perhaps you could read it.
Sorensen: I'm sorry. I'm unable to read.
Me: Then I'll just tell you. The major theme is that a huge imbalance of power during the Cold War, not fear of communism, led us into Vietnam.
Sorensen: That's exactly right.
Me: It says that America had "decisive military dominance" over the Soviet Union and China, and that Kennedy didn't believe in the domino theory. Not in private anyway. And he was formulating a strategic policy to keep us out of Vietnam.
Sorensen: That's exactly what I'm going to say at the conference.

So folks, you read it here first.

The conference is being sponsored by the National Archives and the nation’s Presidential Libraries. NBC's Brian Williams will moderate all the sessions on Saturday, March 11. I said it was star-studded, dint I? Don't bother showing up if you don't already have a ticket. The organizers have posted this notice: "Due to the overwhelming public response, the conference is now closed as we have reached capacity."

Postscript: Will someone please ask Brian Williams to ask NBC to stop embarrassing him? This morning the network aired this TV commercial: "Ask not what this appliance can do for you. Ask what your appliance can do for your home." C'mon.

Posted by jherman at 8:57 AM

March 2, 2006

THE LIES WITHIN

So the New York Public Library bought the William S. Burroughs archive, with "11,000 pages of manuscript and typescript material," most of it from the 1960s and '70s, and never seen by scholars. The purchase likely cost millions. The report doesn't mention the price. It does mention Burroughs's cut-up experiments and his sense of humor. I wonder whether the collection includes the manuscript for this tasty morsel from HARD/1, a little mimeo mag that appeared in the summer of 1972, which I have in my files.

Lie Lie Lie

By William Burroughs

Xolotl and Ouab are organizing guerrilla resistance in South America. First step is to weed out the proliferating CIA infiltrators ...

A jungle camp. The CIA volunteer with a dead man's cover story is escorted into a thatched hut by two guerrillas.

Xolotl is sitting on a stool the shrunken heads of other CIA agents on shelf behind him a tiny American flag at half mast planted by each head. The CIA man's cover story stirs queasily. Xolotl is a black salamander boy with yellow electric eyes. A Ouab bird is perched on his shoulder. He motions the CIA man to a stainless steel stool in front of him. The two escorts stand in the doorway of the hut machine guns cradled chewing coca juice.

"Welcome friend if you are one. Sit here and hold my hands ..."

Ouab the cat boy with quick precise fingers is making adjustments on an improvised switchboard. A dome-shaped metal reflector descends from the ceiling and stops two feet above the CIA man's head. He looks up nervously.

Xolotl: "Are you connected with the CIA or any related intelligence service?"

"No senor. Those cabrones killed my brother ..."

"Lie Lie Lie" screams the Ouab bird. Ouab electrocutes the CIA man with a blast of DC.

"That's the way they should have made electric chairs in the first place. DC not AC."

Ouab perfects a small portable lie detector that can be used by anyone after a few weeks training.

"Are you connected to the CIA? That reads. What do you consider this could mean?"

The CIA man's head shrinks to the size of an orange. Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz holds the head in his hand as he addresses intelligence agents.

"So a stupid head ... We can inflitrate as well and better ..."

Here is the seedy generalissimo in a Miami cocktail lounge with two CIA men.

"Yes I will have another double whisky. Yes we will resist the slave driver Mao and his gang of cut throats with the help of our American FRIENDS" ...

And here is a top-level defector with his brief case. Hot biological weapon. Just one little piece of misdirection ...

PS from Herr Doktor von Steinplatz: "We are on course so using the cold war nonsense for our own purposes."

Which is a lie within a lie within a lie.

Burroughs always said real events do not occur until a writer writes them. Curveball, anyone? ("Top-level defector with his brief case. Hot biological weapon. Just one little piece of misdirection.") To say nothing of the Viet-'Raq connection ("... dishonesty and deception ..." etc.) Furthermore, I normally wouldn't think of yoking Bill Burroughs and Ted Sorenson in the same sentence. But given Sorensen's emphatic remark yesterday about the mendacity of the current U.S. regime and this old Burroughs satire in my files, I think their names fit well together.

Posted by jherman at 9:47 AM

March 1, 2006

TED SORENSEN'S ITALICS

Grim and getting grimmer -- that's my "take away" from this afternoon's roundtable discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations about the situation in Iraq three years after the invasion (per yesterday's item, now with Gareth Porter's "Lessons of Vietnam" appended).

Asked by Jane Arraf (former CNN Baghdad Bureau Chief) whether the latest violence in Iraq is a turning point in the war there, Stephen Biddle (senior fellow for defense policy at the council) replied: "It's an acceleration of what we've seen before rather than a fundamental break. What's changed is the intensity of the fighting."

In other words, the brink of civil war is, in fact, a civil war. And here was the topper from Steven Simon (senior fellow in Middle Eastern studies and co-author of "The Next Attack: the Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right"): "I'm in my usual state of suppressed panic." Which got a laugh.

Since the council will be posting a transcript and audio of the roundtable, probably by tomorrow, I'll link when it goes up rather than report a summary of what was said by a lot of well-informed people, including the fourth roundtabler, Noah Feldman (a professor at New York University School of Law and a former senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq).

I'd rather describe my short conversation with Theodore Sorensen, right -- JFK's great speechwriter, close friend, special counsel, and biographer -- whom I buttonholed after the roundtable to get his take on the Bullshitter-in-Chief and the cronies of his regime. Out of politeness -- we were within earshot of diplomats and other high-minded types -- I didn't characterize the Bullshitter et al that way. But if I had, I don't think Sorensen would have minded.

"I have lived a long time," he said, "and I have seen a lot of administrations. But I have never seen an administration as incompetent -- and as mendacious -- as this one."

The emphasis was his. I asked Sorensen, who will be 78 in May, if I could quote him. He asked, "Who are you with?" I told him I'm a freelance journalist and blogger, and that I'd be posting his comment on my blog. He smiled. "Yes," he said, "of course." He could have backed off, but he didn't. Now that's menschy.

Posted by jherman at 4:54 PM